I woke up this morning, which in itself was quite pleasing, to find I had a bad knee, which wasn't. Well over 20 years ago I was walking up the garden at our old house and noticed by the reflection in the patio doors, that I was walking like my father. Now I found myself hobbling and making oooh, oooh noises like him too. The knee even gave way on the cellar steps causing me to fall over backwards with such a crash and yell as caused Deirdre to look up momentarily from texting someone on her phone. My father didn't really believe in having things wrong with him and certainly didn't believe in cures, so he wouldn't have taken Ibuprofen, which wasn't available until 1964 anyway. I did take some and have walked off the
worst of it, as you will be very relieved to hear. At the height of the pain however, I bravely carried my newly painted garden ornaments and repatriated them. The owl, you may note looks less than satisfied with his new livery, bu t the female statuette, Oh so demure.
Deirdre had her Skype Spanish lesson with her teacher, currently locked down in an apartment in Spain. Deirdre feels that social isolation is causing her brain to slow down, so I was relieved that she hadn't forgotten the recipe for her Vegie Chilli. Sammie and I played Scrabble and soundly defeated the computer again, even though it rarely came up with a word either of us had heard of. Take 'teiid' for instance!
Then we found we needed a prescription and stamps with lots of family and friends' birthdays pending. Enter our wonderful community support volunteers - pleasant, willing, highly organised and professional.
Some more birthday cards arrived, and it seemed churlish handling greetings from loved ones with rubber gloves on, but I suppose they could be accidentally sending me a congratulatory virus. I decided to treat myself to a birthday present - something long and lasting, so I ordered a 35 metre hose-pipe from Amazon. This necessitated disposing of the old one that had perished and become brittle. Stuffing about 15 metres of hose-pipe into a wheelie bin is a bit like forcing an angry cobra into a bucket. It's amazing, however, how much pleasure can be derived from cutting up a recalcitrant hose-pipe with a large pair of loppers. I had a similar battle with my ipod, trying to delete material and add some new albums -it too nearly ended up between the blades of my loppers.
Does it seem as if this is a day going nowhere? But it did go somewhere, down into the woods of Crich Chase where a tide of bluebells flowed down the slopes. And new paths unfolded we had never discovered before, some of them less than half a
mile from our house and ranging out secretly from the well-worn routes we knew inside out. Like Robert Frost we.."took the one less travelled by,/And that has made all the difference." Because not only did we encounter new glades of bluebells and freshly blooming garlic, but lovely people too: Amanda with her family, George sunning himself on top of the hill and surveying his homeland of Heage across the valley, and a charming new family recently moved to Crich and unable to believe their luck. A gin and tonic sitting beside the pond in the last flush of sunshine was the obvious finale.
I suppose our days will inevitably be fragmented with no organisational principle at the centre, but today we went along with random pieces and they jigsawed together into something rather satisfying.